Financial Services Marketing Archives - Act-On Marketing Automation Software, B2B, B2C, Email Tue, 12 Aug 2025 16:42:01 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.2 https://act-on.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/cropped-AO-logo_Color_Site-Image-32x32.png Financial Services Marketing Archives - Act-On 32 32 Marketing Automation for Financial Services https://act-on.com/learn/blog/marketing-automation-for-financial-services-marketers/ https://act-on.com/learn/blog/marketing-automation-for-financial-services-marketers/#respond Mon, 02 Oct 2023 14:57:00 +0000 https://act-on.com/?p=478870

The financial services industry poses unique challenges for marketers: Balancing creativity with strict regulatory requirements. Navigating digital transformation in a slow-moving industry. Generating growth even as the larger economy falters. With the Fed actively waging war against inflation, and the rate increases that come with it, it’s enough for any financial industry marketer to cry for “help!” 

Fortunately, help is here, in the form of marketing automation for financial services. This technology allows finance marketers to personalize their communications while standardizing their operations at scale. A survey of marketing leaders found businesses use marketing automation to “streamline marketing and sales efforts” (38%), “improve customer experience” (34%), and “improve customer engagement” (28%). 

Of course, technology alone is never the sole answer. However, financial services marketing automation is a powerful tool that marketers can use to get ahead despite difficult market conditions. 

Two businessmen discussing marketing automation for financial services.
Marketing automation for financial services can help address the sector’s unique marketing challenges.

Examples of Marketing Automation for Financial Services  

Marketing automation tools can help you create unique, tailored brand experiences that nurture customer engagement, no matter the size of your team. Organizations may achieve different levels of financial services marketing automation maturity over time. But, the core goals remain the same: streamlining and personalizing customer experiences at scale. 

With a solid automation strategy, you can set up technical integrations, customer segments, and personalized campaigns once. Then all you need to do is to deploy them repeatedly to drive results with minimal manual effort. 

Here’s what this day-to-day reality looks like for financial services marketers. Whether in the context of a bank, credit union, insurance brokerage, or wealth management firm: 

Email Marketing Automation 

Automating your email marketing for financial services involves integrating your email service provider with your CRM, running A/B tests to improve open and click-through rates, personalizing content, and automating nurture campaigns throughout the customer life cycle. Use cases abound. You can use automation to enroll new leads  in nurture campaigns that send educational content over time. You can send new client onboarding campaigns to drive engagement with their new accounts. And you can promote new offerings like credit cards or loan products through upselling and cross-selling campaigns.

Social Media Automation

With social media marketing automation, your team can save valuable hours when it comes to notoriously time-consuming activities. Automate repetitive tasks like scheduling and publishing content, and use advanced features like social media listening and employee advocacy to stay on top of conversations and comments while driving positive engagement. 

closeup of a spreadsheet to illustrate the idea of marketing automation in financial services
Improve your multichannel coordination with marketing automation for financial services.

SMS Marketing Automation

SMS marketing is a key component of marketing automation for financial services. With it, you can use automation to schedule text messages within your ongoing campaigns, track performance, and include engagement data in customer profiles. This could include standard alerts and notifications, promotional texts sent to a targeted segment of your audience, or even behaviorally triggered SMS messages that you send after a client or lead takes a specific action. (And even though it should go without saying, we’ll say it anyway: Make sure to stay on top of the SMS marketing regulations that protect consumer privacy.)

Landing Pages and Web Content Personalization

Financial services marketing automation tools help you personalize and optimize the content on your website and landing pages. This way, you can deliver a better experience to visitors while improving campaign results. For example, you can conduct A/B tests to increase conversions and build templates to help create variations of pages at scale to power your campaigns. Additionally, you can use dynamic web forms to improve lead capture and gather behavioral tracking data to personalize site content on future visits. 

Segmentation

Building advanced customer segments is the foundation for providing personalized experiences down the road. Marketing automation for financial services helps you segment your prospect and customer lists. These can be based on “firmographics” like company size, demographics like location or gender, and behaviors like webpage visits or email click-throughs. You can use segments to send more targeted communications and drive results across the entire customer life cycle. 

Financial services marketing teams can put these different automation use cases into practice to achieve bigger-picture goals like improving the customer experience, generating leads, driving customer lifetime value, and ensuring compliance. 

Email Marketing v1

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How to Improve the Digital Customer Experience

Marketing automation for financial services makes it easy (or at least easier) for teams to create a better digital customer experience. It also allows them to achieve the two key outcomes we mentioned earlier: personalizing and streamlining digital customer experiences at scale. Here’s how: 

Create Consistency Across the Customer Journey

Today, most customers start their journey to choosing a financial services institution by doing online research. To communicate your organization’s story, value proposition, and services clearly while building trust, you need to deliver a consistent experience across every touchpoint. 

One of the biggest reasons that financial institutions struggle to improve the digital experience is they haven’t mastered optimizing the complete buyer’s journey, cutting across multiple channels. 

This is where marketing automation for financial services comes in. Marketers can first develop the strategy and messaging that should run throughout every campaign and touchpoint. Then, they can use financial services marketing automation tools to build templates and create assets at scale, develop repeatable communications, and integrate campaigns across the web, email, SMS, and other channels. With this kind of consistent execution, rather than one-off messages or uncoordinated activities, customers experience less friction and a more cohesive brand experience. 

Deliver Personalized Messages at the Right Time

In addition to consistency, financial services clients expect personalized experiences relevant to their needs. One survey reported that 72% of banking customers rated personalization as “highly important.” Only 8% said it didn’t matter at all. 

Personalization is about meaningful relevance: delivering the right message at the right time to meet a current need. This is where marketing automation for financial services can help. By mapping your marketing activities across the customer journey, segmenting your audience according to their current stage, and delivering communications and content tailored to those moments, you can achieve truly impactful personalization at scale. 

Generate Leads With Automated Content Marketing Campaigns

Your prospects are doing a lot of research online before they ever reach out to a bank, credit union, or advisor. This presents a real opportunity to attract new leads through organic search and content marketing. Financial service marketers can connect with potential customers by creating and sharing relevant, helpful content tailored to the early stages of the research process. This allows you to build trust and become a go-to resource by focusing on education instead of selling (for now). 

Marketing automation for financial services makes achieving meaningful results from your SEO efforts easier by creating pathways for customers to gradually move along the customer journey toward a purchase or account. For example, after a visitor clicks on a search result page to read your blog post about online investing, you can guide them to sign up for your newsletter. Another possibility is enticing them to download a gated guide with more in-depth information or, at the very least, click through to another related blog post. Ultimately, the goal is to nurture these visitors to sign up for an account or contact your sales team. 

With marketing automation for financial services, you can collect the right data and send the right follow-up messages to make that journey a seamless one. And research shows content marketing can be incredibly effective for financial services marketers, with organic search driving up to 64% of calls. 

Woman presenting financial services marketing automation insights.
Improve your relationships with clients new and existing, with financial services marketing automation.

Drive Customer Lifetime Value With Advanced Targeting

Across industries, it’s usually much more expensive to attract and convert a new customer than to keep an existing one. Financial services are no exception. Marketing automation for financial services can help you collect and use customer data to power targeted marketing campaigns. This will drive engagement and improve lifetime value. 

Collect First-Party Data to Understand Your Customers

Over the past few years, government agencies and tech giants have introduced new privacy-friendly policies. They restrict how marketers can collect, purchase, and use data from third-party sources like programmatic advertisers or aggregators. In response, marketers across sectors are adapting by focusing on first-party data. 

First-party data is data that you own because you collect it directly from your customers. Examples of first-party data include form submissions, website behavioral data, email click-throughs, SMS engagement, and phone call success rates. These data points can be used to better understand what your customers care about. They can also be used to see what questions they have, and how they prefer to be contacted.

Financial service marketing automation collects data for you throughout the customer journey. From tracking beacons installed on your website to assigning unique phone numbers for paid campaigns to recording email engagement metrics across recipients. 

Use Data to Build Better Segments

Your financial services marketing automation software collects data. With it, you can build out more advanced segments of your customer list. You’ll know which customers clicked on an article about car loans in your recent email newsletter, who checked out the business lending page on your website, and who downloaded your new guide to online investing. 

You can also create segments based on your customers’ account types, age of accounts, past purchase history, life events, and other data points that capture their current stage in the customer life cycle. 

Target the Right Customers With the Right Offers at the Right Time

Financial service marketing automation helps you put your data-driven segments to use by laser-targeting your customers with the messages they’re most likely to be interested in at the right moment. Are they checking out new credit card options on your website? Send them a limited-time bonus offer when they click to sign up. Did they just leave you a perfect score on a customer satisfaction survey? Ask them to refer a friend, and offer an incentive to do so.

Bottom line: By using first-party data to tailor your messages and offers, you’ll create a more personalized experience that will lead to more engaged customers over time.

Marketing Automation and Compliance 

Financial marketers know that securing legal approval for marketing content is time consuming, and let’s be honest here, sometimes it’s downright frustrating. Here’s the good news: When you’re  executing repeatable, automated campaigns, you only need to go through the approval process with your legal team once. Doesn’t that sound like a dream? Just think about how much time you’ll save. 

Does your marketing automation solution include a BCC archiving solution? If yes, you can achieve FINRA-compliant email marketing within your existing tool stack. 

Case Studies in Financial Services Marketing Automation

Of course, you don’t have to take our word for it. Commercial banks, credit unions, insurance agencies, and wealth managers are putting marketing automation to use with outstanding results. Here are just a few examples: 

Georgia United Credit Union: 96% Increase in Application Volumes 

Georgia United Credit Union implemented marketing automation to improve the member journey and create segmented marketing programs. They offer personalized content to attract and retain new members. Using marketing automation for financial services, they achieved a 77% open rate on their welcome email, cross-sold thousands of new products via the marketing automation platform, and experienced a 96% spike in application volume. 

“Having our member data file integrated into Act-On gives marketing the ease and independence we didn’t have in our old system, allowing us to send more frequent, more segmented and personalized communications.”  

-Amanda Hullinger, Marketing Supervisor, Georgia United Credit Union

Tower Federal Credit Union: Increases Open Rates by 300% 

Tower Federal Credit Union uses marketing automation to automate email campaigns and improve segmentation efforts. They also use data and analytics tools to more effectively understand member behavior and run reports. The credit union is experiencing a 300% increase in open rates and follow-up emails. 

“We’ve seen a two to three times increase in our open rates, especially to the follow-up emails, and we’ve seen a lot more customers starting loan applications.”

-Marc Wilensky, Vice President of Communications and Brand Marketing, Tower Federal Credit Union` 

RATESDOTCA: Increases Total Annual Email Revenue Target by 15% 

Canada’s largest and most trusted digital financial acquisition platform uses Act-On to achieve more dynamic segmentation and personalization. Using marketing automation for financial services, they support the entire customer life cycle. They also moved beyond a traditional website shopping experience and delivering more personalized communication to customers’ inboxes. The company has achieved a 20% average click-through rate for marketing campaigns and increased the total annual email revenue target by 15%. 

“Act-On allows us to build automated programs that power our entire outbound efforts. The Automated Journey Builder, in particular, helps us map our content and then visualize and facilitate our customer journeys from start to finish. It’s actually the main selling point of our new product — totally automated renewals.”

–Lydia Ku, Senior Marketing Manager, RATESDOTCA

It’s Possible for You Too!

These stories show that with the right strategy and tools, financial services organizations can use automation to accomplish exceptionally personalized marketing at scale. 

Want to read a few more stories or to share the potential results of marketing automation for financial services with stakeholders? We’ve compiled an entire collection into a single, easy-to-read document. 

Email Marketing v1

The growth of your business hinges on your ability to attract, nurture, and convert leads. Act-On’s automated lead generation gives you everything required to nurture an unknown prospect into a happy, loyal customer.

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]]> https://act-on.com/learn/blog/marketing-automation-for-financial-services-marketers/feed/ 0 Marketing Automation Guide for Wealth Managers https://act-on.com/learn/blog/automate-your-wealth-management-marketing-processes/ https://act-on.com/learn/blog/automate-your-wealth-management-marketing-processes/#respond Fri, 08 Sep 2023 23:46:37 +0000 https://act-on.pantheonlocal.com/learn/automate-your-wealth-management-marketing-processes/

Introduction

Marketing automation for wealth managers, can help asset management firms focus on what’s most important: helping clients plan their financial future. Without it, marketing can feel like a distraction from that core function.

Wealth management marketing is all the more difficult by relying on manual approaches to data collection, follow up, and nurturing leads into clients. If you’re not automating your marketing operations, you’re essentially leaving money on the table. And as a wealth management firm, that’s the last thing you want to do.

Fortunately, there’s a solution. Marketing automation software can help you track user behavior and get the data you need for segmentation and personalization. It can also help you develop and launch upsell and cross-sell programs for your current clients. Let’s explore, shall we?

TL;DR: Wealth managers can save time, boost client retention, and attract the next generation of investors by automating their marketing. From tracking client behavior to personalizing campaigns and nurturing leads, marketing automation simplifies complex processes and supports long-term growth. It’s the smart way to build stronger relationships, increase assets under management, and future-proof your firm’s success.

Track Wealth Management Client Behavior

One of the best benefits of using marketing automation for financial services is the data. When you’re tracking your efforts correctly, you’ll have data on how people use your website, landing pages, emails, video content, SMS blasts, and social media posts. This added visibility will help you build more knowledge about your clients and what makes them happy.

These insights can help you improve your customer journey and deliver a better client experience. Then, take things a step further by implementing lead scoring based on these behaviors. This process will help you “nurture” the lead as they move through the sales funnel. The best part? This process is fairly easy once you’ve implemented your marketing automation solution.

Financial Industry Use Cases Collection

Retain Clients and Grow Your Assets Under Management

Marketing automation provides the foundation for personalized marketing campaigns that drive growth for your wealth management practice. Your marketing automation platform can help you segment your audiences and make specific offers at just the right time. You can educate and engage new clients with automated nurture sequences. Or win over on-the-fence prospects with client case studies and infographics showing their wealth’s growth potential if they sign up.

That means you don’t have to spend precious hours sending emails to your prospects manually (or spend money hiring someone else to do it). You don’t have that kind of time! With marketing automation, you can group all of your contacts into specific segments based on their demographics, behaviors, financial goals, and interests. Once everyone is segmented, you can deliver more targeted messaging uniquely suited to them. This way, you can get super specific about different investment opportunities or services depending on who you’re speaking to. 

A married couple shakes hands with their wealth management professional across a kitchen table.
Add new clients and retain existing ones with automated nurture campaigns that prove the value of your services.

Reach the Next Generation of Investors

According to Forbes, roughly $30 trillion in assets are about to be passed from the Baby Boomers to younger generations in “the great wealth transfer.” Appealing to millennials and Gen Z means speaking to them in their language: digital communications.

According to the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center (GFLEC), “Approximately 80 percent of millennials use their smartphone for transactional purposes like paying bills and depositing checks, and 90 percent use their phones for informational activities like tracking their spending.” However, the GFLEC report also says that smartphone usage for financial services management doesn’t correlate with individuals improving their financial practices. Therefore, it’s up to wealth management firms and financial advisors to help younger investors better understand their opportunities.

Build a Digital First Customer Journey in Wealth Management

Here’s an example of what a digital-first customer journey might look like. 

  1. A young professional receives a promotion at work and begins exploring more advanced financial investment options.
  2. After searching “financial literacy for Gen Z,” she clicks on your website.
  3. She does some light research but doesn’t request any further information or content.
  4. Over the next 30 days, she receives your advertisements as she browses online.
  5. She clicks on an ad. She’s redirected to a landing page with a gated asset titled, “Improve Your Financial Literacy in 5 Easy Steps.”
  6. She submits her details, reads the content, and begins to sharpen her financial knowledge and skills.
  7. Meanwhile, now that you have her contact information, you can place her in a custom segment and begin sending automated email campaigns.
  8. Tracking her behaviors and interactions, you’re alerted when she hits a certain lead score, indicating she’s moved on in the buyer’s process.
  9. At this point, you begin more direct and personal sales outreach with the hopes of securing her as a client early in her career.
  10. Once your new client has begun her investment journey, you continue to provide relevant and regular content and messaging for potential cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

Once you turn on all of the switches, you simply wait for the data to roll in and A/B test and optimize as necessary. Everything is simple, streamlined, and efficient. 

Closeup of an ipad and printed charts showing the performance of an investment portfolio.
Appeal to younger investors with digital deliverables like sample charts showing portfolio growth.

Summary

By streamlining your processes using marketing automation, you and your team will have the time and resources you need to develop and distribute more personalized content. The efficiency you gain helps you get time to refine your brand messaging and external communications, and provide the tailored support your prospective customers and current investors so desperately want and need. Don’t fumble around with a bare-bones email service providers (or worse, sheets in Excel). The sooner you start combining great strategies with great technologies, the sooner you’ll be able to beat out rival firms.

Financial Industry Use Cases Collection
]]> https://act-on.com/learn/blog/automate-your-wealth-management-marketing-processes/feed/ 0 How 3 Insurance Companies are Leveraging Marketing Automation https://act-on.com/learn/blog/how-3-insurance-companies-are-leveraging-marketing-automation/ https://act-on.com/learn/blog/how-3-insurance-companies-are-leveraging-marketing-automation/#respond Tue, 05 Jul 2022 14:00:00 +0000 https://act-on.pantheonlocal.com/learn/how-3-insurance-companies-are-using-marketing-automation-to-stand-out/

Introduction

There are people out there on a quest to find your insurance products and services, and once you capture their attention, you don’t want to lose it. So how can you win attention and trust, then turn that into revenue? That’s a great question and one that many insurance companies are asking.

One of the most important ways to grab attention and keep it is to personalize your messaging and your offers. 3 out of 4 insurance customers report they were influenced to purchase insurance based on personalized promotions.

So, how, exactly do you go about personalizing marketing on a mass scale? That’s an easy one to answer – it’s insurance marketing automation. This article gives you three real-life examples of how to leverage marketing automation solutions for insurance agencies to capture more interest, convert leads and grow business longterm. 

TL;DR: Three insurance companies—RSA Insurance, Physicians Insurance, and IAMS—boosted engagement, conversions, and retention by using marketing automation to personalize outreach, segment audiences, and track results. Benefits included higher email open rates, improved customer retention, increased conversions, better compliance, and streamlined marketing operations.

Benefits of Insurance Marketing Automation 

As an insurance marketer, you likely segment customers into groups. And this is a good strategy, it helps you to deliver more relevant content to people. But your customers don’t want to feel like they’re one of many, they want to feel like an individual. Talking to a customer in a way that makes her feel known is a matter of segmentation and personalization. Doing so at scale is a matter of having the right data, strategy and tools. 

Using marketing automation software makes it much easier to talk to people about what they want in a way that feels more personal. A few benefits include: 

Delivering the Right Content at the Right Time

Marketing automation allows you to segment your audiences by creating content triggers, and personalized nurturing campaigns. Connect with your audience at the right time with the right offer, and sometimes before they even realize they have a new need. 

Boost Cross-Sell Business and Retain Customers 

You already know that retaining existing customers is far cheaper than acquiring new ones. But here’s something else to consider: current customers spend on average 67% more than those new to your business. Automation helps you to cross-sell existing customers based on the products and services they most likely need because you can access the right insights at the right moment. 

Let Your Prospects Convert Themselves

Research from PricewaterhouseCoopers found that 71% of people surveyed report they do some kind of digital research before buying insurance. Insurance industry marketing automation helps you to view prospect behavior in real-time, allowing you to provide relevant content and build trust.

Help Your Insurance Marketing Team Do More With Less 

There’s one more important benefit of insurance marketing automation to consider – marketing efficiency. If you have a large department and many resources, you still need ways to create more efficiency in processes. If you have a smaller marketing department, your team might be downright overloaded. Marketing automation helps to get rid of time-consuming manual tasks so that your team can make a bigger impact. 

Ready for your examples? Let’s take a look at how 3 insurance companies are using marketing automation and experiencing these benefits. 

How RSA Insurance Pumped Up Email Deliverability 

RSA Insurance is one of the oldest and most well-known insurance providers in the world, serving individuals, small businesses, and larger companies. Even though the company was well known, it struggled to get the attention of its audience. The company targets brokers and risk managers, and these people get a lot of emails. As a result, standing out in the inbox is hard. 

Before implementing marketing automation, understanding marketing results was also difficult. RSA couldn’t see who opened their emails and who did not. Without this data, the company didn’t really know if its audience was engaged. It also made measuring ROI more challenging. 

RSA leveraged Act-On’s marketing automation platform to get visibility into open rates, engagement, automated campaigns, and A/B tests to understand and improve results.

The RSA Insurance success story had some exciting results: 

  • Increases open rates to 18-20 percent above the industry average. 
  • Designed emails faster and more easily connected with their target audiences. 
  • Improved ROI since they could measure how well marketing efforts worked. 
  • Facilitated easier compliance with GDPR. 

How Physicians Insurance Implemented Automated Segmentation

Driven by a trend of doctors leaving private practices to work for larger clinics and hospitals, Physicians Insurance was navigating a decrease in demand. Many larger medical organizations have self-insurance plans, which eliminates the need to buy individual policies. Physicians Insurance wanted to expand its business model to reach different types of buyers, like hospital administrators and executives, but was stuck in figuring out how to do so. 

They used an email service provider (ESP) to stay in touch with prospects and customers, but the system was rife with problems. For starters, the ESP solution didn’t integrate well with internal systems and lacked advanced segmentation abilities. Without the ability to deeply segment audiences, Physicians Insurance couldn’t provide the level of personalization that today’s buyers expect. 

In addition to attracting a new clientele, Physicians Insurance needed to continue improving cross-selling activities to maintain its most important source of revenue. Email marketing was still important, but Physicians Insurance wanted to take nurturing a step further to improve customer retention and growth. Marketing automation allowed the firm to create more personalized interactions that were more meaningful and relevant to each customer.

Using Act-On’s marketing automation software, Physicians Insurance could segment based on job title, specialty, geographic region, and more, helping the company to get more personal with communications. 

Creating campaigns was also much easier, with a drag and drop editor that made it faster to create existing and future messages. Reporting helped the company to better understand and assess how buyers interacted with messages. Were prospects and customers responding positively? And if not, what changes could they make to do better? Greater visibility gave them the data to make changes. 

For example, the company learned that doctors read their emails very early in the morning and on holidays and their days off. This information allowed them to strategize how and when to best engage. 

Using automation provided several positive results, including: 

  • Email open rates as high as 30% for existing clients. 
  • Customer retention rate above 95%. 
  • Connected MarTech stack to create programs that do a better job at reaching customers. 
  • Access to the right insights, at the right time to make better decisions about who to reach, and when. 

How IAMS Increased Conversion Rates 

A customer with an inbox full of unread emails is looking for ways to clear it out fast. Hitting the select button and moving an email to the trash happens in seconds, and if you want to save your marketing from the trash, you need people to see value in what you deliver. 

Insurance Agency Marketing Services (IAMS) is a company that helps thousands of agents across the United States with developing leads. The agency struggled to help clients stand out in a competitive market and needed to improve marketing intelligence and lead tracking. 

Without personalized interactions, emails from IAMS clients were constantly overlooked by prospects and customers. Webinar registration was low, and according to the metrics, people were disinterested in receiving and opening marketing messages. The agency needed to transform a disengaged audience into one that was excited to receive emails, and willing to register for events, like webinars.

Using marketing automation, the company: 

  • Delivered personalized content that increased webinar registrations by 470% opening the floodgates to new, fresh leads. 
  • Grew website traffic by 300% with click-through rates that tripled to 6% far exceeding industry email marketing campaign benchmarks. 
  • Improved email reputation and deliverability rates, so that more customers and prospects received emails. 

List segmentation allowed IAMS to talk to the right people at the right time, and better insights helped to understand what types of content customers liked the most. With a better marketing automation tool, the organization can now view campaign performance, and make quick decisions about how to improve results. 

Improve Your Insurance Marketing Results with Act-On

You’re trying to reach customers at a time when the digital noise has never been louder. If you hope to capture their attention, you need them to feel excited every time they see your emails and open your content. And this can only happen when every experience feels personal. 

Of course, you can’t personally understand every customer at every moment, which is why you need insurance marketing automation to help you use data, implement segmented programs, and scale. Marketing automation for insurance agencies delivers the right content to people along their buyer journey and gives you the insights required to continue to improve. Do this well, and you can retain more customers, cross-sell more products and improve prospect conversion rates.

Summary

Learn how insurance companies can use marketing automation to personalize communications, improve targeting, and enhance results at scale.

  • RSA Insurance improved email deliverability, engagement, and ROI through data-driven campaigns.
  • Physicians Insurance used advanced segmentation to tailor outreach by role, specialty, and location, resulting in high open rates and a 95% retention rate.
  • IAMS transformed disengaged audiences into active participants by delivering relevant content, increasing webinar registrations by 470% and website traffic by 300%. Across all cases, marketing automation helped teams work more efficiently, connect with customers at the right time, and achieve measurable growth.
]]> https://act-on.com/learn/blog/how-3-insurance-companies-are-leveraging-marketing-automation/feed/ 0 3 of the Best Financial Services Advertising Campaigns https://act-on.com/learn/blog/best-financial-services-marketing-campaigns/ Tue, 21 Jun 2022 13:16:00 +0000 https://act-on.com/?p=487712

Introduction

Marketing financial products and services can be a challenging task. You need to find the right approach to reach your target audience. You also need to make sure that your campaigns are compliant with regulations like FINRA.

That’s why we’ve created a list of three of the best financial services advertising campaigns that you can implement into your financial services marketing strategy right now. Read on for tips on creating successful campaigns using different marketing channels, such as email and social media, all with the efficiency of automation.

TL;DR: Financial services marketing works best when it’s targeted, compliant, and automated. Three of the most effective campaigns right now are: onboarding campaigns to welcome and educate new customers, upselling/cross-selling campaigns to boost product adoption, and engagement campaigns to re-activate inactive members or leads. Using automation ensures these campaigns are personalized, scalable, and data-driven for better results.

What to Know About Financial Services Advertising Campaigns

Financial services marketing campaigns come in all shapes and sizes. But before you launch your next big campaign, you should keep a few things in mind.

  • Your campaigns must be compliant with financial marketing and advertising regulations. This includes adhering to rules set by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Along with other state or local laws that may apply to your business.
  • Your campaigns should be focused on a specific goal. Examples: acquiring new customers, increasing product adoption, or reactivating inactive customers.
  • You’ll need to use data from your marketing campaigns to inform your strategy. This includes tracking metrics such as leads generated, conversion rates, and ROI.

Let’s get into the 3 best financial services advertising campaigns to run now. 

Onboarding Campaigns

An effective onboarding campaign is designed to welcome new customers and help them get started with your product or service. It’s important because it helps define the path for a new customer, encouraging them to interact with and get the most out of the product or service they signed up for — empowering them to eventually become invested in future offerings as well.

Onboarding campaigns can be vastly improved using email automation for a more personalized approach. This allows you to reach a large number of people directly without having to manually send each message yourself.

For example, you can create an email campaign that automatically sends new bank customers a series of welcome messages once they have signed up for a checking account. These emails can include information on what they can expect, important contact information, how to use features like direct deposit and auto-pay, and links to resources they may find helpful. These emails help to form a relationship between your financial institution and the customer, and build brand trust and loyalty.

Upselling and Cross-Selling Campaigns

If you’re looking to increase product sales, an upselling or cross-selling campaign can be a great way to achieve your goals. For this reason, these types of campaigns frequently rank among the best financial services advertising campaigns.

Upselling campaigns focus on convincing existing customers to upgrade to a more expensive product or service. On the other hand, cross-selling campaigns focus on selling complementary products to your existing customer base.

Both types of campaigns can be highly effective in increasing product sales. Before you launch either type of campaign, there are some things to be aware of.

  • You’ll need to create targeted content that speaks to the needs of your audience. This content should be designed to convince your customers that they need to upgrade or add to your product or service.
  • You’ll also want to consider which marketing channels will be most effective for reaching your target customers. Email, social media, and paid ads are a few ways to reach your customers who want to upgrade and/or engage with additional products.

For example, you can create an automated email campaign that talks specifically to a segment of checking customers about a high-yield savings account. Or, upgrade your investment client to a more hands-on, individual coaching package. 

Social media automation is a great way to reach your audience with upsells and cross-sells as well. Create an ad campaign that targets customers who have expressed interest in similar products or services. Let’s say you’ve got a mortgage customer who may be interested in an auto-loan, according to behavioral data. Start serving up some targeted ads about your great auto-loan rates. 

Another effective way to easily reach customers who have opted in to be contacted is through SMS marketing. You can easily offer promo codes or limited offers to customers through their mobile devices.

Inactive Member Engagement Campaigns 

Engagement campaigns are designed to re-engage inactive members and get them interested in your products or services again. They typically involve sending targeted content to your inactive customers like a survey about their experience, a ‘were sorry to see you go’ type of email, or even a special offer to entice re-engagement. Best of all, such messages can easily be automated for a more efficient and effective approach.

For example, if an investor hasn’t signed on to his online account for 6 months, you may want to send an encouraging message with an offer of a free consult call to find out where that investor might be stuck and offer advice that energizes him about his investments again.

But what makes a customer inactive? Typically if there’s been no transactions for 12 months, a customer is considered inactive. It’s important to be aware of this disengagement before the 12-month mark. Using a CRM can help create reports showing customer activity, highlighting those that are on their way to becoming inactive. From there, you can determine triggers for sending automated emails to entice them to use their accounts or services. This is when you can decide whether to offer a special rate, promotion, or simply reach out and see why they haven’t been using their account. 

Reengagement campaigns can also be used for non-customers, like those who initially signed up showing interest, but never committed to any services. For example, if someone signed up for marketing emails but hasn’t opened one in six month, you can create an email campaign o entice them. Create a catchy and clickable subject line with a special deal for a first-time sign up or offer a bundle of products or services created especially for their segment. If you know someone is reaching retirement age, offering them account services to handle their retirement funds and make the most of their savings can be a great way to pique their interest.

Make Your Financial Marketing More Effective With Automation

Implementing your best financial services marketing campaigns relies on using effective digital marketing automation. The data you get from marketing automation allows you to gain insight into what is working for your customers and potential customers, and get more effective with your campaigns in the future. So, if you are not currently running an onboarding campaign, upsells and cross-sells, as well as an engagement campaign for both customer and leads who have slowed down on their opens or visits, this is your sign to go and build them today. 

Summary

Finding the best financial services advertising campaigns requires balancing compliance with creativity and strategic targeting. This article highlights three high-impact, automation-friendly campaigns to strengthen customer relationships and increase revenue: onboarding campaigns that guide new customers through products and services, upselling and cross-selling campaigns that offer upgrades or complementary products, and engagement campaigns designed to win back inactive customers or unconverted leads.

By leveraging automation across email, social media, SMS, and CRM systems, financial institutions can deliver personalized, timely messages at scale, track performance, and continuously optimize their approach.

]]> 4 Massively Important Financial Services Marketing Statistics https://act-on.com/learn/blog/financial-services-marketing-statistics/ Tue, 07 Jun 2022 13:55:00 +0000 https://act-on.com/?p=487634 Are you wondering if you’re on the right track with your approach to financial services marketing? Maybe you’re curious what other people in the industry are focusing on, or want to make sure you’re aligning with current trends like marketing automation.

We’ve gathered sources on 4 financial services marketing statistics to watch, with examples of how institutions like banks and wealth management firms are addressing the issues they represent.

4 Statistics on Financial Marketing and What They Mean for Your Business

1. 72% of Customers Say Personalization is “Highly Important”

Your financial services customers receive far more personalized interactions than ever before. They can jump on their phones, receive personalized shopping recommendations, and have those items delivered to their doorstep within a couple of days or sometimes a couple of hours. Curated clothing recommendations? No problem. Suggestions for that special holiday dinner with a pre-populated grocery list? Done. But these expectations don’t stop at shopping experiences, as they flow into all business interactions, including those with financial institutions. 

A recent McKinsey report found “[t]he biggest reason companies fail to capture the full benefits of their digital improvement efforts is that they concentrate on optimizing individual touch points rather than first tackling the customer experience as customers actually experience it – the complete journey that cuts across multiple functions and channels.”

A banking customer survey found that 72% of respondents said personalization was “highly important” and only 8% reported that it’s not important at all. This sentiment holds true across all demographics, including Millennials (79%), Gen Z (75%), and Gen X (74%), with a slight decrease for baby boomers (58%).

The solution is to create a customer journey-driven strategy to meet rising demands around personalization. A strong plan for customer segmentation that leverages automation helps you tailor specific messages to specific audiences based on behaviors and interests. 

For example, Centra Credit Union leveraged segmentation and automation to get super focused on members with an educational campaign targeted at the benefits of opening a new certificate of deposit. The campaign led to 35% email open rates, 470 new certifications, and over $10 million in new deposits over several short weeks.

2. Customer Experience is the “Top Priority” for 73% of Financial Services Marketers 

Financial services marketers are responding to meet the demand for better customer experiences. In fact, three out of four financial services marketers say that improving the customer experience is a top priority. And most customers don’t just want a better experience – they demand it.

The majority of U.S. banking customers under the age of 55 say they have no problem switching banks, and seven out of 10 say they would change banks to improve their experience. 

Financial services marketers can no longer deliver weakly–personalized content, because people expect much more. Every time a prospect or customer receives an email, product recommendation, or phone call, they want to feel truly known and understood. Marketing automation helps you achieve this level of personalization.

3. Organic Search Drives 64% of Calls to Financial Services Providers 

Creating high-quality and specifically-researched content is essential, since organic search drives 64% of calls to financial services providers. If you want to stand out against the competition, you need to publish SEO-optimized content that draws in that high-intent organic traffic, then convert and nurture that traffic with marketing automation. 

Research shows that less than one-fifth of companies say their content marketing is “very successful.” If you want to get more traction from your content, you need to get more personal. Create high-quality content that ranks well with search engines, but then capitalize on the power of data to capture leads with the right offer. 

Tools such as lead scoring allow you to further understand what prospects are most likely to buy and help you get salespeople involved with the right prospect at the right moment. 

4. Less Than One-Fourth of Marketers Say They’re Using Marketing Automation to its Ultimate Potential

Do you use automation? And if so, could that automation perform better? Act-On recently teamed up with Ascend2 and published a survey of 162 marketers. We wanted to learn more about how marketers use automation since it’s such a critical tool to provide the personalization and the customer experience that customers demand. 

The survey revealed that only 22% of respondents said they are “successful” at using marketing automation to achieve their most important priorities. 62% of marketers said they are only “somewhat successful,” and surprisingly, 16% say they “aren’t successful at all.”

So, even if you’re using marketing automation, there may be room for improvement. When used well, it can help increase efficiency, align sales and marketing, increase conversion rates, and create more personalized marketing experiences for your customers.. And whatever is working well, you can identify and then scale. Without comprehensive marketing data, you can’t really do that. 

With the right solution, you can easily set up and expand marketing automation and reach more prospects and customers through personalization. 

The Statistics Are Clear – Use Them to Inspire Your Next Move

Financial services marketing must focus first on the customer. And, if you didn’t believe that when you opened this article, you should now. The statistics are clear that personalization and segmentation are 100% expected by your best customers, and that organizations just like yours are placing a huge focus on customer service because of that expectation. You’ve got to provide the information and support your customers need and answer the questions they are searching. When you do, you’ll have a much better chance of capturing some of that sweet, sweet organic traffic. According to the stats, there is so much more potential for all of these efforts with better use of financial services marketing automation.

Want a Simple Guide to Marketing Automation for Wealth Managers?

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]]> Digital Revolution in Insurance Marketing (Infographic) https://act-on.com/learn/blog/digital-revolution-in-insurance-marketing-infographic/ Fri, 13 Dec 2019 17:50:00 +0000 https://act-on.com/?p=495123

5 Marketing Challenges Facing Insurance Brokerages

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